A week later, I get out of my car in St. Ignatius Cemetery. Dressed in black, arms full of flowers, I walk across the flat green lawn toward a gravesite.
It's the same cemetery where they buried Stalwart, but I'm not here for him. I wasn't invited to the funeral, which happened just yesterday. Seems I'm persona non grata in superhuman land these days; the Protectorate forced me to take early retirement and even revoked my membership from the organization.
Nobody likes a troublemaker, apparently.
Not that I would have come to the funeral if they'd invited me. Just seeing it on TV made me sick to the stomach--the flag-draped casket, the procession down Main Street, the weeping citizens, the twenty-one gun salute. The President of the United States--the friggin' President--reciting a
